Social media investors' sentiment as stock market performance predictor

Purpose This study examines the impact of social media investor sentiment on the stock market performance through qualitative and quantitative proxies. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a sample of daily stock performance related to S&P 500 Index for the period from December 18, 2017, to December 18, 2018. The social media investor sentiment was assessed through qualitative and quantitative proxies. For qualitative proxies, the study relies on three social media resources”: Twitter, Trump Twitter account and StockTwits. The authors proposed 3 methods to reflect investor sentiment. For quantitative proxies, the number of daily messages published from Trump Twitter account and StockTwits is considered as a signal of investor sentiment. For regression model, the study adopts the autoregressive distributed lagged to determine the relationships between the nonstationary series. Findings: Empirical findings provide evidence that quantitative measures of investor sentiment have significant effects on S&P’500 performances. The authors find that Trump's tweets should be interpreted with caution. The results also show that the number of Trump's tweets on t−1 day have a positive effect on performance on day t. Practical implications Social media sentiment contains information for predicting stock returns and transaction activity. Since, the arrival of new information in capital markets triggers investor sentiment on social media. Originality/value This study investigates the investors’ sentiment through social media and explores quantitative and qualitative measures. The amount of information on social media reflects more the investor sentiment than content analysis measures. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2022-0818